Rape and Sexual Torture

The women of Falun Gong tell wrenching tales of physical and sexual abuse in captivity. They have been sexually assaulted with brooms, sticks, or electric batons, causing vaginal bleeding. Their breasts have been pierced with barbed wire, and they have been gang-raped.

Men are not spared sexual torture either, and are beaten and shocked with cattle prods, sometimes lasting from 9:00 at night to 8:00 the next morning. The torturers use cattle prods all over their bodies, including inserting them into their anuses.

According to the Status of Chinese People website, scores of different sexual torture methods are used on Falun Gong practitioners. The methods employed include rape, molestation, rape with foreign objects (such as toilet brushes and batons), shocking genitals with electric batons, shoving hot peppers into the vagina, tearing off nipples of men and women, kicking genitals, administering drugs that cause menstruation to cease, and forced abortion.

MS. TAN GUANGUI of Heilongjiang Province before and after being sexually tortured and gang-raped by male prisoners and guards in the Wanjia Labor Camp, 2001. By the time of her release, she had suffered a mental collapse.

“Among the true accounts of unbelievable brutality, the immoral acts that shocked my soul the most were the lewd yet routine practice of attacking women’s genitals by 6-10 Office staff and the police,” wrote prominent Chinese human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng following his investigation into the persecution of the Falun Gong.

“Almost every woman’s genitals and breasts or every man’s genitals have been sexually assaulted during the persecution in a most vulgar fashion,” Mr. Gao wrote in a December 2005 open letter to Communist Party leaders.

Gao himself was imprisoned, tortured, and sexually violated for his investigation into abuses against Falun Gong detainees.

The immoral acts that shocked my soul the most were the lewd yet routine practice of attacking women’s genitals by 6-10 Office staff and the police.CHINESE LAWYER AND NOBEL PEACE PRIZE NOMINEE MR. GAO ZHISHENG

“Two people stretched out my arms and pinned them to the ground. They used toothpicks to pierce my genitals. There are no words to describe the helplessness, pain, and despair that I felt then,” Gao later wrote.

One group letter from Chinese women who practice Falun Gong summarizes what they have suffered as follows: Police “have sexually violated our bodies with eggplants, toothbrushes, and plastic water bottles. In one female labor camp located in Jilin Province, police inserted hot pepper powder into women’s vaginas in order to force them to give up their belief and practice of Falun Dafa.”

A report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women cites an October 2000 case in which 18 women who practice Falun Gong were stripped naked and thrown into jail cells containing convicted male criminals who were encouraged to rape the women without any repercussion. The aim of such abuse is to humiliate and traumatize female Falun Gong practitioners, and it has led to mental instability, disability, and death.

After being rescued to the United States, Falun Gong practitioner Ms. Yin Liping testified at a hearing of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, where she described the sexual torture she had experienced at the Masanjia forced-labor camp. She was locked in a room with four inmates who beat her until she passed out and then gang-raped her. After she regained consciousness, she was told the assault had been videotaped, further humiliating her.

One of the most prominent rape cases is that of Ms. Wei Xingyan. On the evening of May 13, 2003, the graduate student from Chongqing University was arrested for possessing balloons and banners printed with messages about Falun Gong, such as “truthfulness, compassion, forbearance.”

A policeman ordered two inmates to strip her naked. Then he forced her to the floor and raped her in front of them. Once news of her story was exposed outside of China, her university and the local authorities attempted to erase her identity.